There’s something I’ve always loved about Islam ever since I learned about it. It’s one of their divine laws: taking a trip, at least once in their lives, to Mecca. Normally, I can never appreciate very specific religious rules. One of the things I’ve always hated about Christianity (well, I’m only talking about what my grandmother used to make me do when I was a little girl) is having to go to church every Sunday.

One might say that they’re the same thing; that only distances differ. In a way it is the same, and in a way it isn’t. To me, a baptized Christian, going to Mecca would mean more... and I can’t really say why. It’s a feeling.

Lately, and that is to say for the last couple of years, I’ve been more spiritual than anything else. After going through several adolescent phases, if you will, passing from paganism to atheism to agnosticism to deism, and God knows what else (mind you, in my heart, I felt and truly believed all those religions – changing forms of faith often has never seemed superficial to me; quite the contrary, the search for one’s true beliefs has always been quite noble in my opinion) I settled on something I can’t quite name, and don’t know if I’d want to. My belief is quite simple: that something higher than humans, spiritually, can exist... whether it does now or will in the future. And it’s not a hope of improvement, but rather something I must believe in order to keep going on.

Why going to Mecca seems more important, more noble... well, it might be because it is a test of endurance, although, in our days, more of a test of financial (in)security. I doubt anyone will be crossing seas in boats or deserts on camels in order to get to Arabia; not in this 21st century anyway. And it’s sad really because that’s what makes this trip so noble, the difficult road makes the destination ten times more divine. I love technology, I love it that we have mastered flight, but how can one have a spiritual trip on a Boeing?

I’m probably never going to go to Mecca. Not that I wouldn’t like to, but because it would be unjust to 'paganize' a temple with the different religion of a ”mere” tourist. I would however like to walk the desert.

I’ve always loved the desert. It’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed Dune so much, and dared read the Saga twice. I can stare at pictures of great seas of sand for countless hours, which I have done several times. However, I can only imagine how it would be to actually sit on a dune, with the scorching sun up above or perhaps at dawn or dusk, with the great disk somewhere on the horizon, or at night, under the moon and stars. But whichever the time of day, you have the wind as your companion and only disturbance. And everything’s so silent that thoughts turn to whispers, and you can hear them precisely. It’s beautiful, calm, it’s before-Chaos, it’s before-Order, it’s before-Genesis. And you can practically hear galaxies being born, but nothing else matters because the wind makes you smile and for a second you’re the smallest grain of sand and the only God present in the Universe.